> i worry that medication harbors a reliance on drugs

It can also get you out of bed when nothing else does. Or prevent you from killing yourself when you otherwise would have. Or give you a push to take small steps to get your life together. All of these effects are valuable despite efficacy being far from 100%, there being side effects and issues with reliance.

Thank you, I really don't think that questions like "Why do we do X?" lead anywhere, because they have the built-in assumption that everyone does X and that everyone does it for the same reason.

No. If a multi-billion dollar company completely overturned its revenue model, it wouldn't be the same company anymore. And the billions of people who have used their services for years wouldn't be happy with suddenly having to pay. Can some subscription services work for some people and some products some of the time? Sure. But Google has so many services, coming to so many people for free, and making them so much money from ads, that even the hypothetical is ridiculous.

I would consider paying. I don't mind Google selling ads, just don't do it while tracking users.

The reason for the tracking is to better target the ads, you can't separate the two in Google's model.

> quickly become an expert on a topic you know nothing about right when you need to be

This simply doesn't happen for anyone.

But the first 10-100 hours of learning and using a new language feel so good.

1. Not really, the richest x% own and run the companies, and can spend more, but the mass of consumers of the products are spread across the wealth spectrum.

2. The idea to reduce the population based on some metric is a dangerous road to go down on.

3. By definition there will always be a richest 10% regardless of how many humans you get rid of.

> Go is in the same category. People are inventing better versions of C++ when I want them to invent better versions of Python. :)

In terms of use cases Go is much closer to Python than to Rust and C++.

Which idioms in Python are you referring to?

The pythonic ones

What's the more general pitch for learning a functional language in the first place?

I don't think there is a general one anymore.

The original "wouldn't it be better if we just passed data around through simple composable functions" kinda won, you have first-class anonymous functions with support for closures in most languages today in use :-)

I think the next pitch is along the lines of "We can solve the evil of mutable state making your app hard to debug/test" and i.m.o. that took over a bit as well, i.e. with frontend we usually have state in one tree sitting somewhere and what we display is just a function from state to our html.

And I have seen the state being represented as a fold/reduce over events in the application.

So the pitch i.m.o. is along the lines "Hey, we converged on the idea that functional programming is good, why not use language that has good support for it" :D

It forces you to learn a new and different way of thinking about programming and solving software problems. Even if you never end up actually using a functional language, many of the techniques and approaches you learn can be applied in all languages.

Learning Haskell was probably the single best thing I've done with regards to becoming a better programmer even I've never really written much Haskell since then

Do tell more, what high level stuff do people want to use Rust for?

Depends on what you define as "high level stuff", really. We're seeing an increasing amount of people who are writing network services and web back-ends in Rust; that's sometimes perceived as "high-level", depending on where you sit in the stack.